NORTH SHORE BOOK NOTES:

By Rae Padilla Francoeur

Tuesday

Jan 1, 2019 at 9:02 AM

A new Tana French novel is cause for celebration and “The Witch Elm” is 509 pages of delicious reading. French outsmarts at every twist. She sets scenes and instills moods in beautiful sentences you want to linger over. Best of all, she gives her characters, each with his or her unique point of view, the gift of a pliable and vulnerable life.

“The Witch Elm” By Tana French. Viking, 2018. 509 pages. $28.

Good friends, young and hale and full of possibilities, frequently gather at Toby’s family homestead, the Ivy House. They talk and horse around and have free rein in the big house, the gardens under the massive old elm and the Irish countryside. They come of age under the casual oversight of Toby’s beloved Uncle Hugo.

Suspense writer Tana French takes a spade to Toby’s idyllic life and hollows it out, bit by bit. Murders, beatings, brain cancer, love won and lost, a cruel garrote, relentless and canny detectives — the cuts go deep.

A new Tana French novel is cause for celebration and “The Witch Elm” is 509 pages of delicious reading. French outsmarts at every twist. She sets scenes and instills moods in beautiful sentences you want to linger over. Best of all, she gives her characters, each with his or her unique point of view, the gift of a pliable and vulnerable life. And every once in a while, French hits “delete” and another one bites the dust — sometimes literally.

Toby starts his story before the police find his friend Dominic’s long decomposed body wedged into a massive crook in the elm. We first meet Toby as he’s contemplating his good fortune and considering an advancement in his career as a publicist. Not long after that, he hears a noise in his apartment and goes to check. Two robbers viciously beat him and he nearly dies. Most compromised are his memory and speech. He convalesces at The Ivy House with his lovely, upbeat girlfriend Melissa. They both care for Hugo, who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Toby is unreliable, in part due to the beating and his sketchy memory but more so because his good looks and good fortune sheltered him from what was going on just below the surface. His friends Susanna and Leon had been in a struggle with Dominic that had persisted through childhood. Dominic was a bully and sexual predator, though Toby was mostly oblivious. Sometimes, without realizing it, his blithe actions made things worse.

One afternoon when friends and family are gathered at Ivy House, one of Susanna’s children finds a human skull. Tests show it to be Dominic’s, who sadistically harassed both Leon and Susanna. Dominic had disappeared after sending his friends a group email that read like a suicide note from a spot on the coast. For more than 10 years, however, his bones were wedged into the crook of what they called the wych elm at Ivy House.

Detective Rafferty, who investigated Toby’s beating, begins to link the beating and Dominic’s death. Rafferty is especially cunning and he won’t let up. Often believing he is the key suspect in Dominic’s murder and helpless to defend himself because of his porous memory, Toby tries to get to the bottom of the murder on his own. Who knows? Perhaps he’s the killer. A tie from his sweatshirt was found in the elm tree, after all.

Whenever Rafferty comes to ask further questions, Toby’s awareness of his peril shifts because Rafferty is always way ahead of him. To Toby’s credit, he gets better at guessing where Rafferty is heading. All the same, Toby finds Rafferty maddening: “He was like a raptor, not cruel, not good or evil, only and utterly what he was. The purity of it, unbreakable, was beyond anything I could imagine.”

It’s as if Tana French channels raptors, too.

“The Witch Elm” is both contemporary and classic, with its lovely ancestral home, the comfort of Hugo’s watchfulness and a hardy band of clever friends — all dropped into a pot simmering with bullies, social media gone wrong and a highly reactive case of post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s a smart book that hangs onto some of its secrets to the very end, a fact readers happily intuit from page one.